You wanted everyone to admire the US and exported the American dream to be the ideal of the world.
Why is it important for America to enforce freedom in every oil rich country - apparently even Canada now!
You can take a "mission accomplished" stance and be done with it, but if America wants to maintain it's standing in the world, these sorts of programs will need to continue.
Without the US footing the bill for this, China will come in with Chinese aid, and teach these countries how to adopt the Chinese ideology.
Trump-Americans are indeed rejecting the post-WWII world order. It is no longer serving us.
Trump is renegotiating the deal with the rest of the world. It could blow up in our faces or we could end up in a more favorable position.
That order was defined by the tension between the east and the west during the cold war, and it can't be overstated what an existential threat communism was perceived as by the west during this period.
Half a century of American politics were based on the premise that if the US did not win against the Soviets, the entire world would live under a world wide oppressive communist regime. Freedom would be a historical footnote.
This meant that the US urgently needed to have its shit together at all points, not just function well, but also look good. The war against communism was fought in the hearts and minds of the world's population.
Since the Soviet union fell, and with nobody to keep the US honest anymore, it's arguably let itself go.
In part it's metaphorically stopped sucking in it's stomach, to hide its flaws and present itself as flawlessly glamorous. Some of the American decline is problems that have existed for a long time that have now been brought to the surface; but I think the lack of competition is also just as big of a factor.
New powers have emerged in the vacuum left behind the Soviet union, yes, but these are all knock-on effects, and I don't think they're perceived as the sort of existential threat as the communists were. Some are trying to paint them that way, but it's not nearly the same.
“I’m worried WW3 is coming… best we destroy our alliance between the wealthiest and most powerful nations on the planet first!”
Brilliant strategy.
Aka you probably should he worried about exceedingly damaging deranged behavior on the part of an individual who is bent upon expanding the powers of the already most powerful office in the land.
It will cause lasting damage.
Trump has already managed to unify all of latin America against him. Bullying will have consequences, and creating enemies out of friends is a very foolish path.
If cost savings were the true concern, there are many less harmful ways to effect them, so don't give me a story of necessity. The belligerence and cruelty is intended.
The Latin America stuff is not bullying. Look at Colombia, Petro's government collapsed after his stunt because even his own government knew he was stupid and picked a bad fight.
Cost savings is just one of the concerns here. A lot of bad things happen downstream of these US Taxpayer funds, including NGOs who use those funds to enable mass illegal immigration.
I'm a Canadian so I'm biased on the topic but it seems what Trump is doing to Canada is completely unreasonable.
Now you just buy media.
Gates has given many billions to public health initiatives as well
However, it also has other factions, especially since Trump and his often bizarre, even irrational takes on what's important, basically took over the Republican Party, making a number of Republicans now also shun programs that previously, they wouldn't have so much as blinked at. This is cowardly of these people, but it's also par for the course with ideological shifts in political leadership.
The rest of the world is in competition with China. They are trying to sell, not buy.
Cool story though.
> Ah yes, the desperately poor are notorious for pulling the strings of global finance. Best to stay on their good side.
You wanted everyone to admire the US and exported the American dream to be the ideal of the world.
> The American dream has nothing to do with giving our money away to foreigners, actually.
Why is it important for America to enforce freedom in every oil rich country - apparently even Canada now!
> focus
You can take a "mission accomplished" stance and be done with it, but if America wants to maintain it's standing in the world, these sorts of programs will need to continue.
> Our standing is derived from our success--from our military, financial and cultural dominance. Your opinions as to our generosity have no bearing whatsoever on our standing.
Without the US footing the bill for this, China will come in with Chinese aid, and teach these countries how to adopt the Chinese ideology.
> These countries don't matter.
but whats the costs overall of changing the official US name of "gulf of mexico" to "golf of mexico"
or the cost to everyone of all this disruption?
whats the costs ive had to pay from Turmp bungling the covid response? how many bungled responses am i going to have to pay for because trump doesnt want the US to have a leading role in the WHO?
the cost of all these deportions? both immediate and future? why am i paying for this RTO mandate that Musk wants to run?
whats the cost of all these tariffs trump's about to put in? wheres my opt out?
Strange thing to be asking honestly.
America is home to over $750 billionaires who would be paying zero income tax. Personally I think that should be what changes.
This is not a serious position. Cost is always a factor.
It makes me a little sad just reading your criticism.
When we hit a point of diminishing returns do I still need to pay incrementally more into this?
All I can say is, probably not none.
And maybe a note on diminishing returns, in that we might want to reflect on the eradication of smallpox and the near total eradication of polio, and what it has meant to you and to your community to not really have to worry about those diseases.
Now that we have established you're willing to pay to prevent diseases spreading to the US, why do you think that screening at the border is superior to reducing the worldwide incidence, or eradicating them and never having to screen for them ever again?
Border screening clearly has a high failure rate, our recent experiences with this should be fresh in your mind. Besides threatening public health domestically, outbreaks in foreign nations are nevertheless a major economic liability. If COVID had never left China, we would still have seen a huge worldwide disruption, for example.
And anyway, screw them, we got ours is a shit perspective. Empathy should be part of the conversation when talking about so much suffering and death.
If it is clearly personal and you do not have an objective answer then let this be a cause we can choose to donate to based on our personal assessment.
I should bear 0 cost.
It looks like US Foreign Aid is ~1% of the Fed budget, so 1% of my taxes. So again, too much.
It's a bundled deal, sorry. It's not just governments that avoid admin overheads - no auto insurance I know will let you pick which specific impacts to insure against a la carte, just to reduce your premiums.
Also, no 2 people will ever agree on the same government spend (to the nearest million), so I don't see the point of your exercise to personally quantify how ones tax dollars should be directed. The point of having a representative government is so that individual citizens don't need referendum on how much to pay for toilet paper at an USAF base in Japan, or disease reconnaissance in central Africa - but both things benefit US citizens (broadly speaking) and need to be done, so congress allocates the money.
And this is why Trump turned it all off. The bundled deal is not working for too many voters. They want Trump to negotiate a new deal on their behalf.
I am certain they'll get the deal they deserve. For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong
Who makes shoes/other goods, mines the earth, or other dangerous work? The people in those poor countries. These programs are often the stepping stone that western countries use to enter countries and "develop the economy" in these areas to the benefit of everyone. Developing the economy brings jobs then brings peace. Then the cost of goods stays down.
Fewer orphans. More experience treating diseases. More stable economies to exchange goods and services with.
Very likely these programs pay for themselves via your taxes via price of goods and services. Entirely ignoring the moral good
All of these programs came after we established our position.
$14.03 per American per year.
The policy mechanisms that are coming into play today were the ones proposed in Project 2025. We had been talking about this for months before the election.
I mean, you aren't going to like playing second fiddle to China, but that's the choice you are making right now.
Considering the Covid lab-leak theory has been confirmed now, we can confidently say that paying for disease research in the world causes more disease.
These people are beyond logic.
>Covid lab-leak theory has been confirmed
There are still brigades of Fauci loyalists shilling for the CCP.
You may like the stench of death and despair all around you - I sure don't want to live in that world.
If Congress voted for 50% taxation and could somehow prove to you that it was all going to care for those less fortunate than you, would you be okay with that? 75%? 90%?
What quality of life are you aiming for the recipients? Do they each get a cot in a shelter? Their own room? Their own apartment or house? Do they get it with no strings attached or do they have to try to improve their own lot while the taxpayer helps them?
How long do we want to extend lives for? Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children. Should a 95 year old get hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend their lives for 6 months?
These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
I’d rather be at the mean income wise in a society with low inequality than in the top percentile of a society that has large inequality. I’ve been both.
I can agree that overspending is not a good thing, but I don’t think the solution is cutting out public programs altogether, I think we should focus on making those programs efficient, eg not making them a charity for multinational corporations that are in great part owned by the very states we consider our “enemies”. Maybe we shouldn’t be lining the pockets of the oil and gas industry, big pharma, etc and instead be lining the pockets of the American people with value through education, opportunity, etc.
What used to happen before vast income tax regimes and welfare states arose was that people who were wealthy would donate huge amounts of money to charities that did what they thought were the right thing. Even the working class donated 10-20% of their income to charities that did the right thing. The way you guarantee that money is spent on the right thing is by having the power to spend it, which means lower taxes.
The social safety net that governments provide today used to be a function of community charities and churches. Even modern healthcare has an analogue here.
Refusing to seek that out isn't the same as it not existing.
That's not to say the decisions were perfect, far from it. But thinking we can arrive at better outcomes by just throwing it all away and ignoring all we've learned is the height of insecurity and arrogance, not a sign of strength.
Edit:
> that's why Americans just voted for someone who vowed to decrease spending
The number of people that voted as they did that would switch their vote if only someone would explain where their taxes went in more detail is extremely small.
We will find a new equilibrium. It will likely not be 0 spending and will hopefully not be the spending regime we have today.
1- Campaign on promise of mass deportations and massive cuts to Fed gov
2- Win the election
3- Begin presidency
4- Deliver campaign promises to cut spending & deport illegal immigrants <--*We are here*
That is absolutely not a given. The currently in-power minority earnestly believe that people are only due the level of healthcare they can personally fund and afford, period.
> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
Which Americans? There's no grand debate happening right now, just a table-flipping tantrum.
It's a fun exercise to do the chin-stroking thing of asking about efficiency and tax rates and so on, but it's so disconnected from the reality of the federal budget that it's hard to believe it's anything other than a cynical tactic.
Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending, and there are effectively no limits to it. Meanwhile, extremely high-leverage foreign aid (like the HIV-related treatments that have been mentioned) are always first on the chopping block, along with things like school lunches and early childhood education that have been demonstrated to be effectively free in terms of how much spending on remediating bad outcomes later in peoples' lives.
>Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending
This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.
In the US spending is controlled by Congress. The Congress was voted on by the people. The idea that Trump throwing bombs into the federal budget is democracy but following Congress' passed budget isn't is ridiculous.
Did we watch the same campaign? Trump absolutely campaigned on ending DEI too. The electorate hates DEI programs. Cutting spending and DEI programs is what got him the popular vote.
You hate white people. Just day it.
It's okay to hate whites on hackernews, just call them Trump-tards.
The purpose of the narrative that DEI is "institutional racism" and the goal of its elimination is to normalize the belief that non white straight male and able-bodied people are inherently less qualified for any position, and to allow legal systemic discrimination against such people.
Which is racist, yes. And sexist, and homophobic and transphobic and ableist.
If you could please not create accounts to break HN's rules with, we'd appreciate it.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
sigh
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59729
Defense accounted for $805B out of a total discretionary budget of $1.7T. The next largest category (using the CBO's classifications, not mine) are veteran's benefits @ $131B, and it goes down from there. If you want to quibble with what "overwhelming majority" means, I guess you can do that, but I doubt that's interesting to anyone.
I'll wait for you to 'disprove' the above.
tbc, I am not surprised by any of this (as you say, he was very clear about his intentions), but let's not pretend that there is any policy-specific valence to the outcome of any vote in the current electoral system. People vote as they do for their own (usually terrible, and usually unrelated to policy) reasons, and the people that win get to do what they will with the power bestowed upon them. Insofar as Trump's and Republicans' actions make life for the bottom ~80% harder, don't be surprised as buyers' remorse sets in pretty heavily. And so goes the "debate".
805/1722 = 0.467
I should have said is that defense is the largest single category of discretionary spending, by a large margin. The thrust of the point remains.
Defense spending is absolutely a priority of this administration. SecDef Hegseth's whole thing is about reorienting the Pentagon back to American defense as the priority. Remember that getting Hegseth confirmed was a major push for the brand new admin.
So spending won't go down but will hopefully be spent more effectively.
Until last November, Hegseth's "whole thing" was being a frat anchor / defense witness for Fox. Talking about him being anything like a serious figure is absurd.
Why ask about raising individual American taxes while turning a blind eye to Trump gunning at lower corp taxes even more than he already had? And we know it will happen because he gets it done, for America *cough oilarchs*
I would be okay with Trump raising the corporate tax rate, instead of saving some 296 of the largest US companies $240B in taxes between 2018-2021[0]. Though this time should be even more, right? He's going to take it to a whole new level of lowest tax rate for Corporates than "any nation on earth". Can't wait for him to lower the tax burden on Big Corp even more, Those C-suites, investors, have such a hard life scrapping by the way they do. No wonder they can't afford better wages for the workers. Let's keep the tax burden on the middle class where it belongs so we can Make America Great Again.
[0] https://itep.org/corporate-taxes-before-and-after-the-trump-...
No they’re actually not. You made those questions up as absurd examples, and they’re absurd.
Americans are already paying far more in privatised taxation - tribute - to healthcare companies, landlords, fossil fuel companies, and loan sharks of various kinds - than they would pay with higher federal tax rates investing in R&D, infrastructure, education, clean energy, and public health.
There's nothing hypothetical about pointing out that the billionaire economy is massively distorted and extractive, and is caused huge public harm which will literally remain visible for geological timescales.
An issue with this is that it isn't just current tax payers and tax revenues that are paying for this federal spending, but a ballooning debt due to a budget deficit. The brunt of this debt's interest burden is going to fall on the future tax payer.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not passing judgment on whether this pausing action was warranted. I'm only responding to the part of the user's comment implying that federal spending is being paid for by current taxes, when it is not necessarily. As a decent chunk is paid for by debt, some of the current federal spending will be the responsibility of future tax payers, including those who cannot yet vote, as these future tax payers will be the ones paying off the interest.
Create an emergency that wasn't there (cut all the fed aid and grants, muck up the government, etc)
Make a solution that will fix it (the soon to be tax bill, also the secretary positions and other stuff)
Stuff that solution with every policy candy you can (pro-life, tax cuts, guns for tots, funding catholic schools, etc. It's going to be a conservative jelly doughnut)
Due to the emergency, we must pass this bill (ram through the tax bill asap, no need to read the thing, blame the slackers, etc)
Declare victory, hope that helps reelection
EDIT: To be clear, I don't think that's what is going through the new admin's heads. At best, I think it's more of a 'pull things out of the engine until it stalls, then put things back in and hope it runs again' kinda thing. But more likely, it seems they really haven't a clue what they are doing. All those people in the first admin that put country in front of self are gone this time around, and it shows.
How do you know your taxes are not going where they should? Do you wish for them not to be used to help the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable?
Was DARPA's tax payer investment in ARPNET worth it or DOD with GPS?
I'm not saying there is abuse in the system, any should be found and dealt with. Nor saying spending should stays the same, money needs to move improve the health, well-being and wealth of non-rich.
Even post-WW1 1919-1966, it went up by roughly the same as post-civil war, 2.2x - and that period includes a depression and heavy income taxes.
Given how much easier it is to double a small economy than a large one, the fact post-WW2 period beat it is doubly impressive.
Also one should note there was actually an income tax from 1861-1872.
* Using Maddison Project estimates of real GDP
Down into the noise on a winner, I think I'll take the one with much lower taxes and far lower incarceration rate as my preferred template to break the tie.
As I stated, it is much easier to double growth when you're small and ultimately, growth rate doesn't matter as you can't spend growth rates. Nominal growth matters. The economy increasing by $5.5k per capita (2011 $) in the period after the civil war is a lot less impressive than increasing by $23k after WW2.
That is also the time period of the Labor wars. Those with money and power were miss-treating the average worker. Again goes against the health, well-being, and wealth of the US citizens. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S...
Part of the hilarious hypocrisy of the modern Republican Party is that they long for the glory days of the 1950s...but are completely opposed to the tax policy required to pay for it or the economic and social policies to implement it.
I think these particular people would be happy to forego all economic progress made in the last 70 years if it meant they could return to a time when being male, white, straight, and Christian was all it took to be at the top of the social order.
why the state sponsored militia, when i could be contributing to some other militia?
It is beyond me how younger people especially are not rioting in the streets with the amount of money that the government has been spending.
But if the government acted more selfishly , like a corporation (it's heading that way), then yes you are also competing with the government in certain areas. It partly depends if the billionaires in question and your semi-fictional idea of government are colluding directly. In which case you would be competing with a n-trillion dollars of capital for things like housing, some of which is controlled by billionaire beneficiaries. Essentially government monopolies are what you might be worried about, which do exist.
In reality the government also spends some of its money on infrastructure and other common-goods, which creates common wealth. The government (with central banks) also creates money so the idea of direct competition (which makes no sense to me outside of something like sovereignty over large amounts of land / mineral wealth / taxable subjects ) isn't so relevant.
Why must everybody else also love paying taxes like you do?
I remember when everyone was calling for public daycare/preschool. I posted an address for anyone who felt it was their duty to pay for daycare of others to send the money for my child. I received nothing but curses. What they really meant was everyone else would pay and they would receive.
Instead, the US does not invest in its people, and fears the immigrants that will do the jobs they aren’t willing to endure or study for. Compare to Asia, where universal education and healthcare are valued at the cultural level and it’s clear why they have sophisticated economies and why jobs have shifted there. The US only holds its position as long as it holds it’s hegemony on global capital, but it also holds record amounts of debt vs GDP, and disruptions like Deepseek are a reminder of where most of the talent in the world comes from. Capital and geopolitical dominance alone isn’t going to save the country. To make America great again, you have to invest in the people. (And if America isn’t the people, what exactly is it to you?)
Not grandparent commenter, but I wanted to make the snark comment that maybe America is now just the blustering violence, at home and exported, and that even bullets are more protected than kids.
I don't care at all about foreign aid.
Unless you want to lock down the USA, stop all international travel and trade then you need to help other countries or else you will also suffer.
It's like society refuses to read history so we need to go back to 1920's every few decades to understand why we have the things we have. Which is sad.